In celebration of the 10th Founder Dialogues event in the series, Founder Dialogues X is excited to offer $20 off a town car ride to our event for anyone who hasn’t tried Uber yet! Haven’t heard of Uber? No problem! Uber is an iPhone/Android app that lets you tag your location and summon a professional driver to your side within minutes. Once in the car, the driver will take you wherever you need to go. The fare is billed to your card, with no need to tip, so you don’t have to worry about handling cash. For Uber’s reliable service area, as well as a detailed breakdown of rates, check out http://www.uber.com/boston.

We’re excited to announce that Steve Papa, founder and former CEO of Endeca, will be kicking off the 2013 series and sharing his success story at Founder Dialogues X on February 26th, 2013 at the Microsoft New England R&D Center from 6pm – 8pm.

Registration: Open to the public. Founder Dialogues X will give back to the community as a fundraiser. We will be charging $10/ticket, donating proceeds to BUILD Boston, an organization that uses entrepreneurship to excite and propel disengaged, low-income students through high school to college success. Along with Founder Collective, Microsoft NERD has generously sponsored the event by donating the space and providing a free drink with each donation ticket. Students may have the option to come for free if they present a valid student I.D. at the door.

Steve Papa is an active investor, board member and mentor sponsoring the creation of a wide variety of tech companies.

He founded the enterprise software company Endeca in 1999 and was its CEO until it was Oracle’s 6th largest acquisition ever on announcement in 2011. Endeca pioneered Guided Navigation, one of the leading search innovations of the decade, and made it an industry standard online. Endeca’s solutions today play a key role in the online commerce, enterprise business intelligence and national security markets. Prior to its acquisition, Endeca had achieved $750M in cumulative worldwide revenue and 700 customers, and had built an exceptionally talented team of over 500 headquartered in Cambridge, MA. Under his leadership, Endeca was named the fastest growing private company in Massachusetts by the Boston Business Journal and recognized as one of the winners of the E&Y EOY awards program.

Prior to Endeca, Steve was part of the original MIT $50K team creating Akamai, a member of the early team at Inktomi in charge of creating the company’s infrastructure caching business, and spent time at Teradata and also at Venrock, the Rockefeller Family’s venture capital arm. Steve holds an MBA from Harvard and a BS in Operations Research and Economics from Princeton University. He is also active as an advisory board member for the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard.

BUILD’s mission is to use entrepreneurship to excite and propel disengaged, low-income students through high school to college success. BUILD students develop their own business ideas, write business plans, pitch to funders, and launch real businesses. This real-world business experience makes school relevant and motivates disengaged youth to succeed. To help them become college-eligible, students also receive tutoring, test preparation, and college advising. Entrepreneurship is the hook—but college is the goal. Over the past thirteen years, 95% of BUILD seniors have been accepted to college, with over 80% accepted to 4 year colleges and universities. (www.build.org/boston)

A special thank you to HubSpot‘s co-founder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah, for sharing his incredible founder journey with the Boston community.

After finding his passion for computer programming, Dharmesh decided not to return to India and to pursue his calling in the US. A self-proclaimed startup addict, Dharmesh tells his stories of serial entrepreneurship and angel investing. HubSpot is a company to watch and its success is not surprising given its founder’s work ethic, attention to detail and drive.

HubSpot provides inbound marketing software that helps businesses attract, convert and engage customers on the web. The company has over 8,000 customers and is a two-time member of the Inc. 500. Based in Cambridge, MA, HubSpot continues to grow and has been listed year after year as one of Boston’s Top Places to Work.

Thanks to returning and new participants. The Founder Dialogues event series is dedicated to celebrating entrepreneurial success within the Boston startup community. Please stay tuned for the announcement of our next speaker soon. Our vision is to showcase local successes and inspire the Boston community to build the next generation of great startup success stories.

We hope you enjoy Dharmesh’s wit in the video capturing FD IX along with the photos below. Feel free to tweet any thoughts or comments using #fdialogues.

As always, a special thanks to Greg Joyce of Willoughby Films for his video talents. We would also like to thank VisibleGains and VentureFizz for their continued support. Ian Holmes kindly joined Nathalie Bishop in photographing and organization for the event. Also, a big thank you to Microsoft for providing the space for Founder Dialogues.